What is 360 Degree Feedback?

As you may know, multiple feedback processes may be utilized in many organizations as part of the employee insight process.

Among them include employee performance appraisals, staff wellness surveys, customer opinion surveys, and much more. But one of the most interesting and comprehensive methods of giving/receiving feedback is by way of a 360 degree feedback, which continues to increase in popularity in recent years. 

For those of you that are unfamiliar with the concept, 360 degree feedback, also known as a multi-rater or multi-source assessment, is feedback or analysis that comes from a range of individuals that work closely with a particular person within an organization.

Usually, this entails everyone from subordinates, peers, to supervisors, and often will even include a self-assessment. Military organizations during World War II were among the first to use multi-person feedback, and the first known corporate example may have been at Esso Research and Company during the 1950s.

The point of a 360 review approach is to allow individuals to get a holistic sense of how they are perceived within an organization on a number of key developmental factors. The idea is that getting a number of perspectives (rather than just the traditional top-down feedback) will eliminate or at least reduce the biases that may exist within certain organizations. From there, the same team members who provided the initial feedback should periodically give assessments, so the individuals get an overall sense of how their development is progressing.

How to Implement an Effective 360 Degree Feedback Process that Boosts Talent Effectiveness

Most organizations use 360 degree feedback to inform their training /development purposes, and it remains very useful when utilized alongside recruitment efforts2. However, there are still some who use 360 degree feedback to evaluate employee performance. At Explorance, we don’t feel that 360 reviews fit within this approach. Learn exactly why with our seperate blog posts, 4 Reasons Why 360 Feedback Surveys Should Not be Used for Performance Assessments.